על חטא: Al Ḥayt by Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo

We have sinned
By yielding to confusion and falling into passivity
By indulging in fear
By giving in to anger
By not standing up for ourselves
By thinking about Jewish values only on holy days
By tolerating global warming, global disease and global poverty
By being cynical about repairing the world
By not defending Israel
By not defending Palestine

For all our sins, may the force that makes forgiveness possible,
forgive us, pardon us and grant us atonement

By not standing up to fanaticism, terrorism, rape and torture – no matter who the perpetrators are
By not rocking the boat
By not being grateful for our blessings
By not loving enough
By being indifferent to the rich getting richer and the poor staying miserable
By allowing greed, in others and in ourselves, to go unchecked
By not opposing laws that promise false security and deprive us of our freedoms and civil liberties
By not opposing ballot measures that deprive us of basic rights

For all our sins, may the force that makes forgiveness possible,
forgive us, pardon us and grant us atonement

By building fences on our borders
By not actively opposing war and invasion of sovereign nations
By being paralyzed by paranoia and hatred
By living in the past and the future but not in the present
By forgetting that we are co-creators of the Universe
By not visiting the sick and the dying
By not making the most of the limited time we have
By speaking loshen hara1
By forgetting how to smile

For all our sins, may the force that makes forgiveness possible,
forgive us, pardon us and grant us atonement

By hiding from our wrongdoings
By putting a stumbling block before the blind
By not searching for the truth, wherever it lies
By not recognizing the divine spark that dwells at the center of our being
By not forgiving and asking God for forgiveness

For all our sins, may the force that makes forgiveness possible,
forgive us, pardon us and grant us atonement

We are grateful to Judy Gumbo for contributing the prayer she co-authored with Stew Albert ז״ל before his passing in 2006. Judy blogs at yippiegirl.com and can also be found on Facebook as “Yippie Girl.” She invites friendly folk to friend her via her FB page “Judy Gumbo Albert.” This Al Ḥeit was most recently used as part of Yom Kippur Kol Nidre services across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street 5772. For more information, visit the community page of Occupy Judaism on Facebook.

Judy Gumbo is the author of Yippie Girl, a memoir in progress about love and conflict among the Youth International Party and other romantic revolutionaries of the late 1960s. With her late husband Stew Albert, Judy co-authored The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (1984). In her later life, Judy was an award winning fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. She now lives in Berkeley, California with her husband, David Dobkin

All fonts rendered through @font-face are licensed with either an SIL-Open Font License (OFL) or a GNU Public License with a Font Exception clause (GPL+FE). Some images are shared with the now-deprecated CC-BY 2.0 (עברית | English) license.

The Open Siddur is a project of The Jewish Free-Culture Society in partnership with Dimus Parrhesia Press. The views expressed in contributed works represent the views of their creator(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of the Open Siddur Project's developers or its diverse community of contributors.